Pattern avoidance is an important topic in combinatorics on words which dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century when Thue constructed an infinite word over a ternary alphabet that avoids squares, i.e., a word with no two adjacent identical factors. This result finds applications in various algebraic contexts where more general patterns than squares are considered. On the other hand, Erdős raised the question as to whether there exists an infinite word that avoids abelian squares, i.e., a word with no two adjacent factors being permutations of one another. Although this question was answered affirmately years later, knowledge of abelian pattern avoidance is rather limited. Recently, (abelian) pattern avoidance was initiated in the more general framework of partial words, which allow for undefined positions called holes. In this paper, we show that any pattern p with n> 3 distinct variables of length at least 2n is abelian avoidable by a partial word with infinitely many holes, the bound on the length of p being tight. We complete the classification of all the binary and ternary patterns with respect to non-trivial abelian avoidability, in which no variable can be substituted by only one hole. We also investigate the abelian avoidability indices of the binary and ternary patterns.

We study the avoidance of Abelian powers of words and consider three reasonable generalizations of the notion of Abelian power to fractional powers. Our main goal is to find an Abelian analogue of the repetition threshold, i.e., a numerical value separating k-avoidable and k-unavoidable Abelian powers for each size k of the alphabet. We prove lower bounds for the Abelian repetition threshold for large alphabets and all definitions of Abelian fractional power. We develop a method estimating the exponential growth rate of Abelian-power-free languages. Using this method, we get non-trivial lower bounds for Abelian repetition threshold for small alphabets. We suggest that some of the obtained bounds are the exact values of Abelian repetition threshold. In addition, we provide upper bounds for the growth rates of some particular Abelian-power-free languages.